Almeida Theatre, to January 27, 2018 reviewed by Nick Joy and Alasdair Stuart

 

Picture this – a 58-year-old anthology TV show translated into a 2.5 hour play in one of London’s small, producing theatres. How does that even work? Well, anything is possible in… The Twilight Zone.

You can never accuse the Almeida Theatre of programming safe productions. A musical version of American Psycho featuring a former Doctor Who? A modern-day Hamlet with Moriarty from Sherlock? But in a moment of inspired genius, someone has now decided that the original The Twilight Zone is ripe for dramatisation.

Writer Ann Washburn has taken 8 classic episodes and woven them into a tapestry. Instead of playing the stories sequentially, they unfold in fits and bursts, some more rapidly, and one in Memento backward-style. The core stage set is the painted inside of a TV set – walls, floor and ceiling covered in galaxies of stars, with the front of the stage itself the frame of a 50s TV set.

Elements from the opening credits sequence come to life – the eyeball, the e=mc2 equation and a spiralling corkscrew vortex. The iconic white door opens and then spirals and pirouettes across the stage. Cast members, when not playing one of the ensemble roles, turn the fluid props and set frames around the stage, dressed in star-spattered sou’westers, goggles and hoods. Naturally, Bernard Herrmann and Marius Constant’s classic title themes are used to add some authenticity.

How much you enjoy the stories depends on your familiarity on the classic tales. At one end of the spectrum, a big fan of the originals like me is aware of every upcoming twist, and so the joy comes from the setup and wondering how they will resolve the story on a live theatre stage. Or you might be unfamiliar with any of the tales and be genuinely surprised with the shock denouements. In fairness, some of the resolutions are a bit hokey, and because they have been referenced so many times since, it’s hard to imagine what the original reaction was.

I really don’t want to reveal which stories are used, suffice to say that they are principally Rod Serling’s, with a Charles Beaumont and two Richard Matheson stories. The full list is included in the show programme, but not knowing which episodes are included helps add to the mystery.

There are some good uses of stage magic to sell the fantasy elements, though a running gag with magically-appearing cigarettes wears a little thin. I also wasn’t sold on the way that characters would suddenly become the Rod Serling narrator, sharing the intro or coda to the story as if speaking in tongues, and much to the amusement of their dumbfounded fellow characters.

John Marquez eventually appears as Rod Serling, in a good approximation of the show’s creator/writer/narrator, but the attempt to make him self-aware of his presence in his own show is a bit too meta for what is essentially a collection of stories with sting in their tails. One of the stories, perhaps recognising the limitations of the theatre stage vs carefully-framed camera closeups, plays its story rapidly and with little context, inevitably diluting its climax, but there’s also the appearance of one classic character, a throwaway reference to most, but a fun Easter egg for the enlightened.

Verdict: With nothing too scary for kids, Almeida are offering an excellent alternative to the family pantomime. Inventive, with a knowing sense of humour, and quite bonkers at times, it really feels like you’ve tumbled into the fifth dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. 8/10

Nick Joy

The first sign you have that something odd is happening is the TV set. And that’s set in both senses of the word; the stage of the London Almeida transformed into a colossal CBS TV set. Normally in the round, the theatre has also cut off the back half of the auditorium to give the massive, ambitious set room to move and breathe.

The stage adaptation of The Twilight Zone, written by Ann Washburn and directed by Richard Jones, with astonishing set design by Paul Steinberg, attempts eight impossible things before the end of the show. It manages all of them, cramming adaptations of eight of the best episodes of the classic TV show into its two and a bit hour running time and stacking them on top of one another. The best segment haunts the others as a televisual ghost, dialogue from two plays over another two, one is a silent vignette that plays out in under two minutes. An entire space launch facility is essayed by cast members walking three sizes of Tintin style rocket onto the stage and immediately off again. The show’s familiar iconography makes constant appearances spun on parasols held by cast members dressed like the star field of the set.

The second sign is that the show takes a little while to settle down. The audience I saw it with laughed at strange places, the slightly overwrought ’50s style meant a couple of cast members registered a little too hard. The whole thing felt, for about the first seven minutes, like it was going to tip over into an exercise in style rather than entertainment.

And then, quite suddenly, everything settles down. The first payoff hits and as the second and third layer on top of one another you start to see what the show’s doing; not only honouring the venerable material it draws from but commenting on it. The style begins to work, and the humour lands really hard. This exchange may be my favourite bit of dialogue this year:

‘Honey! CALL PHIL!’

‘Why?’

‘He’s a physicist! He can help!’

Most importantly, the show becomes more and more unsettling as time goes on. It subverts its own format too, refusing to give us the neat closure the original loved so much. Brilliantly, it does this by having Rod Serling haunt his own characters. Each part finishes with one character suddenly producing a cigarette from nowhere and delivering a Serling-esque monologue that’s never allowed to quite finish. Later, Serling himself becomes a character in the show and in a dizzyingly metafictional moment, so do the audience. It’s a moment of transparency that feels Lynchian in execution. No hey Banda. There is no TV show and yet, we’re watching a TV show. On stage.

What really makes the show land is just how hard everyone works. The cast double as the stage hands and pull multiple duty as numerous different characters. Everyone impresses but Amy Griffiths as Helen in ‘Nightmare as a Little Girl’ is especially powerful. Likewise, Cosmo Jarvis whose work in ‘And When The Sky Was Opened’ is a note perfect Apollo-era astronaut and a world away from his powerful turn in ‘The Shelter’. Finally, Lizzy Connolly is given the extraordinarily difficult task of anchoring the song and dance number and absolutely nails it.

But the show’s best moments are its quietest. Sam Swainsbury and Franc Ashman bring staggering emotional honesty their roles in ‘The Long Morrow’ as a pair of star crossed lovers. Better still, the entire cast are incredible in the longest, best section. Adapting ‘The Shelter’, a story that explores what happens when a missile alarm is sounded and only one house on the street has a shelter, it’s a locked off, claustrophobic piece of drama that is still terrifying, and relevant, even now. See the entire show because it’s great, but make sure you see this section especially.

Verdict: This is the weirdest production you’ll see this year and if you can, you really should see it. With Jordan Peele’s reboot going straight to series, this is the last hurrah for one of the most important genre TV shows of all time, just before it becomes that once again. Confounding, disturbing, funny and massively cool, it’s an experience unlike any other and a Zone well worth being trapped within for 2.5 hours. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart